New Rules Project Commentaries and Articles

Recent comments by Mitt Romney, the probable Republican nominee for President all but guarantee the inequality issue will remain front and center this election year.

When asked whether people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated by “jealousy or fairness” Romney insisted,  “I think it’s about envy.  I think it’s about class warfare.”  And in this election year he advised that if we do discuss inequality we do so “in quiet rooms” not in public debates. More

Let me suggest a sure fire way Barack Obama can win a second term. Stand in the doorway of a post office scheduled for closing and declare, “Not on my watch.” He will be standing with tens of millions of Americans who are rising up to defend our must trusted and ubiquitous public institution.

Last year 3600 communities were put on notice that they will likely lose their local post office.  The Postmaster General promises to close half of the country's 32,000 post offices over the next four years. More

This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens. More

Conventional economists have a lot to answer for but will they listen?

On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging. More

A few days ago NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory complained about Occupy Wall Street protestors “demonizing banks” and wondered, “Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?”

Gregory is right. In many respects Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is indeed a mirror image of the Tea Party.

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In
just three weeks, citizens of Boulder, CO, will vote on whether to
begin a big, formal process to unplug from Xcel Energy’s system and
plug into local energy self-reliance.  The vote to form a municipal
electric utility could set a precedent for communities across the
United States to keep millions of dollars local instead of sending them
to remote electric utilities each year.

At every turn, the utility has stalled local efforts.   

More

A few months ago Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan, an influential book about the crucial importance of unpredictable, unforeseen events on our financial system was asked whether the hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in Greece was a Black Swan event. He replied, “No. The real Black Swan event is that people are not rioting against the banks in London and New York.”

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In the next few days we may decide the future of the Post Office. President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery. The Post Service’s management wants to close 2500 post offices immediately and up to 16,000 by 2020. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced a bill that could end free door-to-door delivery.

Republicans have been railing at the government post office for many years. But for most of us, it is a “wondrous American creation." More

Local solar power hits the sweet spot of cost-effectiveness and economic value for communities.  The best approach for expanding energy is local mid-size projects.

 Click through to see our new infographic, illustrating the optimal size for solar, it’s out-sized impact in generating power, and the enormous economic benefits of local solar power. More

There is much to chew on here.  Recall that Standard and Poor’s justified its action on US credit in part “because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.”  But the driving force behind the Republican Party’s refusal to raise corporate or income taxes is giant global corporations, some of which now have a credit rating better than that of their government. More